2019 is the International Year of the Periodic Table

2019 was declared by the United Nations as the International Year of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements, as it is this year in which the table that is the terror of high school students completes 150 years of its creation.

The responsible for gathering all the elements and creating an organized table to group them was the Russian physicist and chemist Dmitri Mendeleiev, who created the first version of the periodic table in 1869 predicting the properties of elements that had not yet been discovered, by the way. He organized the elements as he wrote his book of inorganic chemistry, creating a letter for each of the 63 known elements containing the symbol of each, the atomic mass and its chemical and physical properties. He then grouped them according to their similar properties into vertical, horizontal, and diagonal relationships. Empty spaces were added already foreseeing the discovery of other elements.

Periodic table proposed by Mendeleiev in 1869

The current periodic table, based on Mendeleev’s table, lists 118 known elements and provides various information on the behaviour of each of them, and in 1955 atomic element no. 101 of the table was named Mendelevius (Md) in honor of to the Russian scientist.

The current periodic table

And, for both scientists and students, technology has been supporting the use of the periodic table. An example is the Merck PTE application, free and available for Androidand iOS , providing an interactive periodic table of the elements. The app allows digital and participatory research, presenting information on the individual elements, properties of the elements and also has a calculator of molar mass, infographic explanatory and comparators of atomic rays and electronegativity. And the content of the app stays available even offline.

The International Year of the Periodic Table aims to recognize the importance of the table as one of the most relevant achievements of modern science, reflecting the essence of chemistry, physics, biology and other pure areas of science. The initiative also has an official website and is supported by major international scientific institutions such as the IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Physics), EuCheMS (European Chemical Society), ICSU (International Science Council), IAU (International Astronomical Union ) and IUHPS (International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology), with the support of scientific organizations in more than 50 countries.